Good Day Gamers! Over the weekend I decided to subject myself to the not-so-anticipated hero shooter Concord. There has been a ton of negativity surrounding this game since it was revealed, and the reaction to the trailer and the closed beta was pretty poor to say the least. There was also news that players were given an additional 4 keys to give away to share with friends, and this still didn’t help with overall player numbers. The main sentiment online is that players seemed to dislike the unattractive character designs, bland gameplay, and the fact that the developers added pronouns to its heroes. While the general response has been very negative, I saw that the game launched its open beta to the public, so I figured I’d give it a try for myself to really see if it was truly the dumpster fire people are saying it is. Here are my impressions.

The Vibrant Visuals

Concord seems to be inspired by a couple of different games that have come before it. It shares a striking resemblance to Destiny 2, (even down to some of the weapon designs) and Overwatch 2. The sad thing is that visually while it is vibrant and colorful, the game has no standout features. The map designs are unnecessarily large and vacant, and the characters are not exciting to look at or fun to play. The heroes only stand out because of their bright colors, otherwise, their designs are just odd and questionable (I’ll get into this further down). As well, I noticed the character models are also weirdly sized. In particular, the larger / tank heroes are just enormous in comparison to the rest of the characters, making them appear wonky and out of place. One of the best part of the visuals are the interesting environments which are the backdrop to the maps. Those are particularly well done and have more going on there than the rest of the game. Its too bad the map design did not implement more of environments surrounding them. Otherwise there is not much going on visually that we haven’t already seen before.

Gameplay And Mechanics – A Poor Overwatch Clone

Overall shooting in Concord is probably its best feature, but it’s still a long shot from being good. Sadly Concord has very unbalanced gameplay mechanics that seem to function in their own time, and not when you need them to. Not to mention the extremely long TTK (time to kill). There was a crazy imbalance as one v one fights were almost impossible to win unless you had assistance from your team. As I played the game, I found that most characters are weaker versions of Overwatch characters and I found it shocking that the gameplay was so similar, and yet, LESS GOOD. As an example, the hero Bazz is a knife throwing character eerily similar to Genji from Overwatch, however, she has far less movement capabilities, or fighting options. While I liked her gameplay concept, with the combination of super long TTK and lack of movement options, I found her basically useless as you cannot escape certain situations. Most especially if you’re up against a longer ranged enemy, tank enemies, or if your enemies are grouping together. And here lays an interesting gameplay exploit, team camping.

The maps in Concord are large and have very specific chokepoints that can be exploited by teams to hunker down and camp out. For some reason team kills are ridiculously overpowered and if teams stick together, they will basically win every match as the overwhelming damage output wipes all individual opponents (even ones with heavy weapons or shields). With the combination of camping and hero abilities, teams can literally camp together and quickly rack up team kills. This was really weird to experience, as you usually find solo players trying to camp in corners – not whole teams. As a strategy it was a unique way to win, but as an exploit, (if people even decide to buy this game) I can see groups of friends just harassing the crap out of their opponents by abusing them as they forcefully funnel them into locked down sections.

Quick Character Highlights

I found only 4 of the 16 playable characters to actually have some solid shooting mechanics, even though I still had a hard time using them. The only military guy or “classic soldier” in the game is Teo who is your generic shooter class and features a full auto assault rifle and grenades. This character is a watered down version of Soldier 76 from Overwatch and is far less interesting. However, his grenades were the only way I was able to get any consistent multi kills in the game.

The character Lennox (who looks like a regular guy with poorly applied lizard makeup) was my favorite in terms of gameplay. While he is a weak clone of Cassidy from Overwatch, I still found his revolver mechanics to be the only ones that synergize well with each other. Regardless, his base gun only has six rounds, so he needs to swap to his secondary quickly to keep the pressure on, and his dodge move auto reloads his current revolver. All together with his healing ability, if timed properly, he can deal some solid damage independently while actually being sort of fun to play and not having to rely on teammates for help.

Next I found Star Child (who kind of looks like a space gorilla with a red face mask) to be the coolest of all the hero designs, but his gameplay was complicated to adjust to and not fun at all. His weapon is a slow / heavy shotgun and he has a set of physical charge and slam moves very similar to Reinheardt or Winston from Overwatch. He’s a get-in-your-face-for-high-damage kind of character, but for some reason, his animations are always interrupted by enemy fire even if you already started your attack. He is a larger target and because of the delay on ability activation, I find he gets shot down super quickly before he can get in close. Very few times did his mechanics work if at all.

Finally the old grandma Dutchess (who looks like she should be resting at home) had a decent WW2 styled submachine and trapping abilities. Dutchess is a ripoff of the character Mei from Overwatch and mimics her ability to create walls. The walls are great for gatekeeping or trapping enemies and her alternate ability is a sort of magic explosion dome which can hit enemies in a corner or tight area. These were the only 4 characters that I found to have some kind of decent mechanics. While the other character weapons and abilities are good in concept only, they do not play well overall and leave you more frustrated then excited for the game.

Confusing Character Design – Who Is This Game Made For?

Okay, after investing 3 hours or so into the open beta to try out each character, I have to be honest. I very much dislike Concords characters. It’s weird to say that about a game, especially a shooter, but I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where I felt like the developer was trying to insult me as the player. The whole thing felt offensive just to look at, and it made me really question, who did they make this game for? None of the characters look cool, interesting, or even exciting to play in any capacity. It was like the developer Firewalk Studios had a contest to make the most unappealing characters they could come up with, selected the worst ones as winners, then put them into this game. It really doesn’t make sense.

Each character somehow feels incomplete, weird, or just wrong, like they don’t belong in any video game. For some reason they thought it would be cool to have a bunch of characters who are alien-like (but not fully alien), handicapped, old, and obese in a space fantasy shooter. There is a logic to creating cool and appealing characters, for example characters having symmetrical proportions, softer features for females, and harder features for male characters. NONE OF THESE ARTISTIC PRINCIPLES EXISTS IN THE GAME. If this is their concept of diversity and inclusion in video games, this is a horrendous representation and it destroys the escapism and novelty of the whole experience. Its hard to enjoy a game like this when you can’t like or understand any of the character options available, regardless if the shooting mechanics are decent.

Now with all of the elements laid out, the disgusting sardine on top of this disaster is the use of pronouns which do not help this game whatsoever. Pronouns for FICTIONAL characters are absolutely useless and unnecessary and they actually hurt the potential success of this game. For some reason, Firewalk Studios is intentionally trying to pander to people with their character design and attached pronouns. In their attempt to appear socially diverse or inclusive, they have completely alienated the entire audience who could have supported their game with these social labels alone. I understand why players were so upset with Concord from the beginning and it makes sense now. In this effort to make something for everyone, they made something for no one, and the studio is suffering for its poor decisions. It’s extremely odd that they’ve chosen to make a game which highlights obesity, unrealistically large / masculine women, racism, and disability to appear inclusive; instead of making something fresh, genuine, creative, or engaging for all people to enjoy. It’s like Concord is intended to be a troll or it’s designed to downright offend and disconnect with the audience.

Closing Thoughts…

Gamers, this was a tough game to play, even for a short amount of time. I tried to look passed the social gender politics of the characters, the blatant racism, the repulsive character design, the old grandma who doesn’t belong there, and the wishy washy mechanics that only work when they want to. Visually the gunplay looks solid, but there is a lot that needs to be fixed, changed, and completely overhauled just to make this decent. If this is the game they wished to make, so be it, totally fine, but I think Firewalk Studios and Sony need to be very transparent about what this project is. It’s an interactive diversity showcase and social political message. Not a video game. It’s been dubbed “D.E.I the game” by many youtubers and I think they’re correct.

In my opinion, Concord is a wasted investment, money tossed in the garbage. Playing the beta was awkward and I felt completely excluded from the experience. It was like no matter what, I could not get into the game because I could not connect with the creative direction. It’s characters are just too abrasive to visually understand and the one cool character it has plays really poorly. Concord tries too hard to copy other games, and fails, as it attempts to find its own identity. Perhaps I’m just not seeing their vision, but truthfully these are some of the most bland and repulsive character designs I’ve ever seen in a shooter, which defeats the purpose of the game’s existence in the first place. It should be about the entertainment, space fantasy, shooter action, immersive alien worlds, attractive characters who are the ideal, not uglified versions of reality which people are trying to escape from through their video games. It felt like they were trying to sell you brokenness and mental disability through the characters, which was so strange. There’s something really wrong about the design philosophy here and its apparent throughout all of Concord. Firewalk Studios completely missed the mark here – unless their goal was to make a game that will fail intentionally. I can only see this game being played by big media outlets who will intentionally overlook the nauseating designs and lie to say the game is engaging to support their messaging, instead of calling this game out for what it is. Then to offer this generic and hollow experience for $40 dollars just adds insult to injury as you can have a better experience with free hero shooters right now. This just makes me think that Sony and Firewalk Studios are filled with people who do not play video games and don’t understand their audiences anymore. I’m sure they know this game could have been something much more successful, but they still chose to make a bad game and a bad product. It’s a F2P low quality hero clone with a price tag.

Please save yourself and avoid this game at all costs.

As always gamers if you made it all the way down here, thank you so very much for your time. I really appreciate you reading my thoughts on Concord. This was difficult to write as I am not a political writer or anything but its hard to not notice the state of things when developers are adding pronouns to fictional characters including robots in games. None of that should exist in gaming but this is 2024, one of the worst years for gaming culture and gaming as a whole – and I can only hope things begin to change for the better as more people become aware of what is happening.

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